Gemini Summer Read online

  contents

  title page

  dedication

  for more than forty years, Yearling has been the leading…

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty-one

  chapter twenty-two

  chapter twenty-three

  chapter twenty-four

  chapter twenty-five

  chapter twenty-six

  chapter twenty-seven

  chapter twenty-eight

  chapter twenty-nine

  chapter thirty

  chapter thirty-one

  chapter thirty-two

  chapter thirty-three

  chapter thirty-four

  chapter thirty-five

  chapter thirty-six

  chapter thirty-seven

  chapter thirty-eight

  chapter thirty-nine

  chapter forty

  chapter forty-one

  chapter forty-two

  chapter forty-three

  chapter forty-four

  chapter forty-five

  chapter forty-six

  chapter forty-seven

  chapter forty-eight

  chapter forty-nine

  chapter fifty

  chapter fifty-one

  chapter fifty-two

  chapter fifty-three

  chapter fifty-four

  chapter fifty-five

  chapter fifty-six

  acknowledgments

  also by iain lawrence

  copyright

  For Skipper

  For more than forty years, Yearling has been the leading name in classic and award-winning literature for young readers.

  Yearling books feature children’s favorite authors and characters, providing dynamic stories of adventure, humor, history, mystery, and fantasy.

  Trust Yearling paperbacks to entertain, inspire, and promote the love of reading in all children.

  one

  The sheriff leaned back with his feet on the desk, watching the blond-haired boy. He was a little man with a sunburned face, with white eyebrows that looked strange on all the redness of his forehead. His cowboy boots had shiny snakeskin tops, and he sat tapping the toes together. There was a blob of blue bubble gum squashed onto one of the soles.

  He watched the boy for a long time before he said, quite suddenly, “You ever heard of fingerprints, kid?”

  The boy looked up.

  “I could take you into the back there and print you,” said the sheriff, “and I’d get what I want like that.” He snapped his fingers. “I’d know your whole name and your address and everything.”

  The blond-haired boy had a dog beside him. He was petting the dog as he sat in front of the sheriff’s desk, in a wooden chair with arms. The ceiling fan that turned slowly above him trailed shreds of cobwebs round and round.

  “Now, is that the route you want to take?” said the sheriff.

  “How could you know my name and address from fingerprints?” asked the boy. He looked at his fingers. “I don’t think you can do that.”

  “Oh, you don’t think I can do that,” said the sheriff. “A real little Perry Mason, aren’t you?”

  The boy said nothing. He had said hardly a word in an hour and twenty minutes.

  The sheriff sighed. He tapped the toes of his boots together. “Say, that’s a nice dog you got,” he said. “What do you call him, sonny?”

  The blond-haired boy didn’t answer.

  “Aw, come on!” The sheriff swung his feet to the floor and slammed a hand on the desk. “Holy moley, what’s the harm in telling me the name of your dog?”

  The boy shrugged. “Maybe you should fingerprint him.”

  “Oh, that’s funny. Yeah, that’s just hysterical.” The sheriff opened a drawer in his desk and took out a key. “You want to sit in the cage and tell jokes to yourself? Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t care,” said the boy.

  “Then that’s what you’ll do.”

  When the sheriff stood up the boy stood up, and the dog stood up beside him. They walked in a line through the office, past the table where the lady had sat typing till dinnertime. There was a police radio there, and a teletype machine, and a shiny kettle that reflected the whole room and the turning fan.

  The dog’s claws ticked on the floor. The boy wished the lady would come back, because the lady had seemed nice. She had smiled at him all the time—just smiled and typed and talked on the radio.

  “You had your chance, sonny,” said the sheriff. He took the boy and the dog down a flight of concrete steps, down to a corridor with a jail cell on each side. He put his key in a lock and opened a cell, sliding the bars across with a rattle of metal. There was a bed in there, and a toilet, and that was all.

  “Empty out your pockets,” said the sheriff.

  The boy did as he was told, embarrassed by the things that came out. There was a rubber band and a bit of string, a bottle cap, an old penny, a plastic man without a head. The sheriff took it all in one hand. “In you go,” he said.

  The boy went into the cell. The dog followed behind him.

  The sheriff drew the bars into place, then turned his key and pulled it out. “When you’re ready to tell me where your home is, just holler,” he said. He went up the stairs in his snakeskin boots.

  The boy stretched out on the bed. His dog climbed up beside him, settling down with its head on his chest.

  “Don’t worry,” said the boy. His hand touched the dog’s neck, and his fingers buried themselves in the black fur. “We’ll get to the Cape, and it’ll be okay. It’ll all work out when we get to the Cape.”

  The dog fell asleep. But the blond-haired boy lay awake, staring at the bars and the bricks. “We gotta keep going,” he told the sleeping dog. “’Cause we can’t go back. That’s the thing—we can’t ever go home again.”

  He looked at the lightbulb on the ceiling. Then he squinted and tried to imagine that it was the sun, and that he was lying outside on the grass with his dog. He thought about his home.

  two

  The Rivers lived in an old gray house in a valley named Hog’s Hollow. All around, in every direction, the city stretched for miles and miles. To the west was an airport, to the north an industrial park. To the south were glass towers and skyscrapers and freeways choked with cars. But down in the Hollow, it was quiet and calm.

  There was a single street laid out like a worm on the valley floor, and only nine houses, all sturdy and aged like the great nests of American eagles. There were seventeen people, but only three children. There were six cats and one dog.

  A narrow stream called Highland Creek flowed southward through the Hollow, creeping past the cottonwoods. Danny River liked to play there, building dams of sticks and mud. Beau, his brother, sometimes helped him smash them.

  Their father’s name was Charlie. But the boys and their friends talked of him as Old Man River. They imagined that he never knew, though Charlie had used the same name for his own father when he was the age of his sons.

  For a living, Old Man River pumped out septic tanks. He owned a black truck with a huge tank on its back and a little cab at the front, and he wore green clothes and brown boots, and carried his keys on a jan
gling hoop at his waist. He could peer into a septic tank, like a wizard into a crystal ball, and see the lives of people. He could divine, in a glimpse, what they ate, and what they tried to flush away, and what colors they were painting their walls. “There are no secrets from the septic man,” he’d say.

  Then there was Mrs. River. It was as though she had slept through the early sixties. While other ladies were trying to dress like Jackie Kennedy, she looked like Eleanor Roosevelt. Florence was her name, but Flo she was called. Little Flo River, barely five feet high, talking sometimes like Scarlett O’Hara.

  Altogether, the Rivers seemed a bit odd to the people of the Hollow, who saw that big truck parked in the yard, and the Old Man always tugging at his filthy cap, and Flo in her cotton dresses, and Danny wading barefoot through the creek. “The hillbillies of Hog’s Hollow” that’s what the Rivers were called.

  In the whole family, it was said, Beau was the only normal one. He did well at school, and he read books and he wondered about things like pollution and the Cold War. Only Beau, it was whispered, would ever amount to anything. “But that Danny,” women would add, “oh, that Danny—isn’t he a sweetheart?”

  three

  Each of the Rivers had a dream.

  For Danny it was to have a dog of his own. He’d wanted one since he was four years old, but his mother had always said no. “A city’s not the place for a dog,” she’d told him a thousand times. “Dogs come to grief in the city.” But Danny kept hoping. He loved dogs so much that it was said in the Hollow that he was half dog himself.

  For Beau, his dream was to be an astronaut. He knew the weight of a Titan within ounces and the distance to the moon within a hundred miles. He even planned his illnesses around the rocket launches at Cape Canaveral. After Gordon Cooper splashed down in Faith 7 in May 1963, Beau went to school with a note from his mother: Please excuse Beau’s absence. He had a touch of space fever.

  Mrs. River displayed her dream in the kitchen window, on the shelves above the sink. The upper shelf was the Old Man’s, a place to show off the interesting things that he’d pulled from people’s septic tanks. But on the lower shelf, Mrs. River kept her dolls. She had Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, all the figures from Gone with the Wind. How she loved that old movie! After all, it had changed her life. She wouldn’t even be Mrs. River now if Charlie hadn’t looked so much like Rhett Butler. No one else in the world knew this, but in a room in the basement, down by the washing machine, Flo River was writing a novel about the South. It didn’t mention the race riots or murders or lynchings. “That’s not my South,” she’d say of things like that. Her South, like her novel, was full of ladies in wide dresses who sat fanning themselves in the shade of big porches, in the shadows of peach trees. Her dream was to finish the book and make oodles of money. She would move the whole family out of the Hollow and buy an old plantation in Georgia. “Down home,” she’d say—though she’d never been south of Virginia.

  And Old Man River? Well, he didn’t have a dream until 1964. And if it hadn’t come to him then, all the terrible events that followed might never have happened. It was the Old Man’s obsession that started it all.

  four

  When Charlie River began digging in the summer of 1964, people thought he’d lost his mind. He went at it in such a fever, attacking the earth with his shovel. He tore up the whole front lawn, digging down through the sod, then down through the dirt. He worked in the daylight, and he worked in the dark.

  On the first day of his digging, Mrs. River and the boys watched him from the kitchen window. They saw him flinging dirt as far as the driveway, his shovel like a catapult. They heard it grinding through the earth, scraping on the stones.

  “He looks like Mike Mulligan,” said Danny.

  After the first ten minutes, the Old Man’s shirt was black with sweat around his armpits, and black along his spine. A gray dust floated at his feet, and with each push on the shovel he grunted.

  None of them would go and ask what he was doing. He looked angry, his face red, his forearms bulging. He was like that when he shoveled snow in winter, except his breath would be puffing white like dragon’s smoke, jetting from his nostrils.

  He worked until nightfall that Saturday, and started again Sunday morning. All through the week he kept at it. When he wasn’t pumping septic tanks, the Old Man was digging up the garden.

  five

  Being the son of the septic man made life difficult for Danny River.

  There were kids who called the Old Man’s truck “the poop-mobile” and held their noses when Danny went walking by. They called him Polluto and Danny Riverbottom. And those were the kids who liked him. They never came down to the Hollow, they never called at the old gray house, but they liked Danny River a lot.

  The ones who didn’t—the mean kids—called him names that Danny could never speak aloud. He had once written the worst of them on an old matchbook that he found on the street, printing carefully in pencil, and then had thrown the matchbook from the middle of the big bridge, to watch it tumble into the Hollow. There were times when the mean kids teased him so much that Danny nearly cried.

  Then there was Dopey Colvig—son of Creepy—who’d been living for a year and a half at the northern end of the Hollow. Creepy Colvig was a construction worker. He went to work every day, driving through the Hollow in his station wagon, in his hard hat, leaving his boy to look after himself. Not one person in Hog’s Hollow found a single thing to like about Creepy.

  But Dopey was worse. He had a huge empty head with no brains inside it. He talked in sounds—in grunts and howls—that no one but Creepy could understand. He was too stupid to go to school, and so he never left the Hollow.

  Dopey liked things that were shiny and sparkly. He had stolen the hood ornaments from half of the cars in the Hollow. He had swiped bottles from porches and a pair of silver scissors from Mrs. Elliot’s sewing basket. Everything he took disappeared into the Colvig house and was never seen again.

  Older than Danny, younger than Beau, Dopey was huge for his age. He was meaner than mean. For no reason at all, he hated Danny River, and he guarded his end of the Hollow like a troll, lurking on the paths through the cottonwoods, waiting for Danny to pass. At any moment he might leap from the bushes or jump up from the wooden bridge. Once he chased Danny through the woods with a realtor’s sign, swinging it like a broadaxe, smashing through the bushes on Danny’s heels.

  Danny had grown up in Hog’s Hollow. He had lived there since he was three months old, so it was the only place he knew. But it had changed for him when the Colvigs arrived, and he kept hoping they would move on, as they had always been moving on. Ever since Dopey had arrived, it was like having an ogre living at the end of the Hollow, blocking the trails that led to the heights and the school. For the last year and a half, Danny hadn’t once walked along there without being afraid that Dopey would catch him. He only felt safe with Beau at his side.

  six

  Through the last, long weeks of the summer of 1964, Danny and Beau were never apart. They built a fort in the woods, and each swore to the other that they would never tell anyone where it was. “Not even under torture,” said Beau. They rode their bikes to the swimming pool and down to the park.

  One day they went looking for bottles, to cash them in at Kantor’s store.

  They went up Highland Creek. Danny tied his shoes around his neck and waded through the stream. When they came across a shopping cart upended in a pool, they dragged it out to carry the bottles.

  They found thirty-seven altogether, nearly one for every yard of creek. Beau said it was like digging for gold in the Klondike. Then Danny said when he got a dog he’d maybe call it Klondike.

  Beau laughed. “Yeah, sure.”

  “It’s a good name,” said Danny. He was rinsing out a bottle in the stream.

  “Yeah, but you might as well forget it, Danny. Mom’s never going to let you have a dog.” Beau stood up like a charioteer on the back wheels of the shopping c
art. “You should be bugging the Old Man, not Mom.”

  “Aw, the Old Man doesn’t want a dog.” Danny shook the bottle empty and brought it up the bank.

  “He had one once. In the navy,” said Beau. “I seen a picture.”

  “Where?” said Danny, unbelieving.

  “In the green box.”

  “Yeah, sure. You never looked in there,” said Danny.

  “I did so.” Beau stepped off the wheels, took the bottle, and put it in among the others. “I looked all through the box.”

  “’Fraid nay,” said Danny.

  “’Fraid so, Bozo! It was a black dog with white legs.”

  Danny waded through the creek as his brother pushed the cart. They were coming near the little wooden bridge where Dopey Colvig often waited.

  “That’s why Dad’s digging, you know,” said Beau.

  “Yeah, sure. Because of his black dog with white legs.” Danny made a spitting sound as he kicked at the mud.

  “No, because of the war,” said Beau. “I don’t know, exactly. But I think that’s why, because of what he saw in the war.”

  “You don’t know what he saw,” said Danny. “Nobody knows.”

  “Yeah, but it made people weird. Like Mr. Kantor,” said Beau. “You know Steve Britain? His dad wets his bed.”

  Danny giggled. “He told you that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Holy man,” said Danny. “If the Old Man wet his bed, I wouldn’t tell anyone. Not anyone.”

  “Steve’s dad wakes up screaming sometimes,” said Beau. He got Danny to help him push the cart up the hill. “This one time, Steve woke him up in his chair, and he took hold of Steve and threw him against the wall.”

  “No fooling?” said Danny.

  “I seen the bruises.”

  “Holy man.” Danny shook his head. “It makes the Old Man look sort of normal.”

  seven

  They wheeled the cart from the Hollow to the streets. Danny thought it was like coming out of the wilderness, as though they were Lewis and Clark. He had to walk ahead, guiding the cart, because it kept turning by itself.